Month: September 2008

Memories Of Keating

by digby

As we watch yet another Republican financial crisis unfold before our very eyes, everybody needs to employ Mr Google to read up a little bit on the Keating Five scandal. McCain was big, big pals with Charles Keating. He spoke up for Keating with the regulators, buying him more space to defraud his investors — and the taxpayers — even more than he already had. He has not changed his philosophy since then. In fact, his closest economic advisor, Phil Gram, apparently believes that these firms should be completely unregulated and then bailed out by the taxpayers on a regular basis.

John McCain has a long history with bank failures and financial scandals. He created his whole reform persona around the idea that he’d come too close to the flame and gotten burned. But he hasn’t changed his philosophy or his policies one bit. He believes in the same scam his close advisor Phil “you’re all a bunch of whiners” Gramm believes. He pretended for years that the problem was solely in the campaign finance system, burnishing his image with signature legislation that has proven to be completely useless. Meanwhile, he backs deregulation like it comes down from Mt Sinai.

There’s more in this post I wrote a month or so ago. And if you didn’t view it before, you might want to take a look at McCain’s press conference and committee testimony from that period. It’s pretty lethal.

Every two term Republican in the last 80 years who isn’t Ike had some kind of a severe meltdown in the financial system. Coincidence?

Update: Here’s a great article on Keating and McCain from the Boston Globe:

Black … maintains that the Keating case was a textbook example of politicians, McCain among them, serving a major donor. And Dennis DeConcini, a former Democratic senator from Arizona and another of the Keating Five who hosted the key meeting in his office, said in an interview that McCain has gotten a relatively “free ride” even though DeConcini insists that McCain was the “most culpable” of the senators because he had the closest relationship with Keating.

McCain met Keating in 1982, during McCain’s successful run for Congress, and soon began accepting offers from Keating to fly McCain’s family on a corporate plane to Keating’s house in the Bahamas. McCain did not pay for most of the trips until years later, when the matter became public.

Keating, meanwhile, complained regularly to McCain that a proposed regulation would hurt his business. Known as the “direct investment” rule, it limited the amount that savings-and-loan institutions could invest from their assets. In 1985, after having “heard frequently from Charlie on the matter,” McCain decided that Keating’s complaints “were sound enough to warrant our assistance.” He cosponsored a resolution sought by Keating, but it failed to postpone the regulation, McCain wrote in his autobiography.

By then, Keating was one of McCain’s most important benefactors; McCain received $112,000 in campaign donations from Keating and his Lincoln associates, mostly between 1982 and 1986.

In the summer of 1986, while McCain was running for the Senate, the banking executive wrote him letters castigating the regulators. “The [bank board] is a mad dog turned loose in a police state,” Keating wrote in one of them. Weeks later, McCain accepted another trip aboard Keating’s jet to the Bahamas.

“I genuinely liked him and enjoyed being around him, especially on those occasions when Cindy and I and our oldest child, Meghan, were invited to his family’s vacation home in the Bahamas,” McCain wrote in his book. “I was never concerned that the time I spent enjoying Charlie’s company would raise public doubts about my judgment.”

With McCain having failed to postpone the regulation limiting investments by a savings and loan, Keating wanted him and other senators to get the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to grant Lincoln an exemption from the rule. McCain subsequently attended two meetings with regulators.

McCain said he felt he had a responsibility to a constituent whose company had 2,000 employees. Yet McCain had reason to be wary. His closeness to Keating had been an issue in his 1986 campaign, and aides urged him not to go to the meetings.

Four senators, including McCain, met with Edwin Gray, the chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in Washington that April in 1987. When Gray returned from the meeting, he told Black he was “very upset” that the senators were trying to pressure him, according to Black’s Senate testimony. Gray told Black to attend a follow-up meeting and take notes. Gray could not be reached for comment.

A week later, five senators, including McCain, met with Black and three other regulators at DeConcini’s office.

“I don’t want any part of our conversation to be improper,” McCain said, according to Black’s notes. Then he launched into a complaint about how regulators were conducting an examination of Lincoln’s finances. “It seems to me, from talking to many folks in Arizona, that there’s a problem,” McCain said, according to Black’s notes.

Black later told the Senate Ethics Committee that the actions of the five senators were clearly “improper.”

“This was an institution that is probably the worst institution in America,” Black said, referring to Lincoln. Instead of trying to help “bring it under control, five US Senators were pushing us in the opposite direction.”

Does anyone truly believe, after the ring kissing and genuflecting McCain has had to do to get back in the good graces of the GOP establishment, that he would be a “maverick” on this issue in 2009? If you do, I have some Lehman stock I’d like to sell you.

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Not Enough

by tristero

This is fine, as far as it goes.

But it’s not enough. After all, Dukakis released a similar ad, and we all know it did him a world of good.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The Dems missed their opportunity to attack McCain in an effective manner when they failed to have anything ready for Palin’s announcement, other than congratulations, and when they failed to seize back the news cycles the day after the St. Paul hatefest. Now, with decent attack ads, they can only stave off further inroads. Today, the Obama campaign will not be able to turn this election around by merely fighting back, although of course they have to do that. Obama must make news. What kind of news? That is the job of the Obama campaign leadership.

Note to all those who think I”m hitting the Dems too hard: save your breath until the polls dramatically show support for Obama. Then, feel free to tell me you told me so, and I will gladly, and with great relief, agree.

Another note: I am not, in any way, criticizing Obama. Personally, he has run a superlative campaign. I think he is one of the greatest candidates for president ever and has the potential to be a great president. However, the support he has received from leading Democrats has been shamefully tepid and the marketing of the campaign in the election cycle has been atrocious. I understand that right now, Biden is just getting around to hitting McCain hard. Good for him. But where was he the day of the Palin announcement when it would have done some good? He was full of good vibes, defending “my friend” John. Again, spare us any defense until the poll numbers turn around. What Biden is doing now is the least he can do, and he’s easily 10 days late in doing it.

McCain/Bush/Palin: Completely Unqualified

by tristero

Here are three truly imminent crises this country is facing. John McCain, like George Bush before him, is completely unqualified to grapple with them. In fact, like George Bush before him, John McCain’s ignorance, his sheer inability to grasp simple facts, and his propensity to gamble on gut instincts all but guarantees he will make things worse.

We’re on the verge of an economic meltdown. Yet, John McCain fully admits he is not qualified to deal with it:

At a recent meeting with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Republican presidential candidate John McCain admitted he “doesn’t really understand economics” and then pointed to his adviser and former Senate colleague, Phil Gramm – whom he had brought with him to the meeting – as the expert he turns to on the subject, The Huffington Post has learned.

And yes, Phil “Nation of Whiners” Gramm is someone McCain still relies on for economic advice.

Then, there’s the catastrophe of Afghanistan:

One of the most experienced Western envoys in Afghanistan said Sunday that conditions there had become the worst since 2001.

Let’s not forget that John McCain was one of the first to make the mistake to shift focus from Afghanistan to an invasion of Iraq:

Within a month [of 9/11] he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!””

As if the Afghan mission was accomplished.

As for the Bush/McCain invasion and perpetual occupation of Iraq, only a fool such as McCain would point to a situation as dangerously complex as the current mess in Iraq as a success:

A Sunni Arab leader of a citizen patrol group in Baghdad who had been a proponent of reconciliation in his neighborhood was assassinated over the weekend.

The killing of the leader, Fouad Ali Hussein al-Douri, a Sunni mosque imam who directed a group of about 65 guards in the Jihad neighborhood in western Baghdad, is the latest in a string of attacks on members of the so-called Awakening Councils. Relations between the Awakening Councils and the Shiite-led government have become increasingly strained.

Administration of the Awakening program, which is made up of almost 100,000 mostly Sunni men countrywide on the American military payroll, is expected to be handed over to the government starting Oct. 1.

About 54,000 Awakening patrol members in Baghdad will start reporting to the government that day. There are serious concerns that many might be arrested for previous links to the insurgency or denied long-promised jobs in the army and the police.

The Awakening members, whose ranks include many former Sunni insurgents, backed by the Americans to fight militants, are often cited as a crucial factor in the improvement of security in Iraq. But they have long been viewed with deep suspicion by many Shiites in the government.

Mr. Douri’s death is a double blow, given his efforts to promote Sunni-Shiite coexistence in a section of Baghdad especially riven by sectarian killing and displacement. Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador, specifically mentioned Jihad in October as a place that was “critical” for preserving security gains in Baghdad.

It was unclear who was responsible for Mr. Douri’s death. Relatives and friends blamed the government. “The Awakenings are being targeted by the government, Iran and Al Qaeda elements linked to Iran and other neighboring countries,” said Nusayef Jassim Muhammad, Mr. Douri’s cousin and neighbor.

Mr. Douri was killed when a bomb concealed in shrubs was detonated as he drove his car into his driveway on Saturday night.

Needless to say, you don’t get to the bottom of a situation like this if you’re too dumb and/or too disengaged to understand the basics of what is going on. McCain doesn’t grasp the first thing about the situation in Iraq:

He said several times that Iran, a predominately Shiite country, was supplying the mostly Sunni militant group, al-Qaeda. In fact, officials have said they believe Iran is helping Shiite extremists in Iraq.

Speaking to reporters in Amman, the Jordanian capital, McCain said he and two Senate colleagues traveling with him continue to be concerned about Iranian operatives ‘taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.’

Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it was ‘common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.’ A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in the presidential candidate’s ear. McCain then said: ‘I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.’

By contrast, I noticed something interesting in this article from Army Times. Now, Josh linked to it because it documents one more egregious McCain lie. But the article also has this to report:

“McCain’s interpretation of Obama’s position is typical of the way in which the Republicans have twisted Democratic views in order to undercut their opponents and at the same time obscure the past positions of the Republicans,” Thompson said. “Future Combat Systems is the centerpiece of Army modernization. However, McCain has been more critical of it than anyone else in the chamber. Obama has been much more detailed and thoughtful in his comments about future military investment than McCain’s very superficial statements.”

And that is part of a pattern. Where McCain blabbers and sneers incoherently, posing – when he’s not sequestered in one of his too-numerous-to-recall palaces residences – as a straight-talking man of the people, Obama is “detailed and thoughtful.” Not just about Future Combat Systems, but on every single serious issue that faces this country.

If experience – as it should – includes taking the time to study carefully the challenges this country faces as it tries to reverse the catastrophe of Bush’s eight-year reign of error, if experience – as it should – includes crafting detailed, practical proposals based upon that analysis, then there simply is no comparison: Obama is the only serious presidential candidate with the experience and seriousness of purpose to lead this country.

Period.

Not A Dime’s Worth Of Difference

by digby

The Republicans have suddenly become concern trolls about “negative advertising” — just as Obama’s harder hitting ads are getting traction. I’d expect to see the GOP work the refs hard over the next week saying that “the campaign” had become dishonest and negative — as if it’s the result of some outside force over which poor Maverick has no control. The media is already robotically presenting the two campaigns’ ads as equivalent.

It’s clever:

Leading Republicans on Sunday faulted both presidential campaigns for the increasingly negative tone of their advertising, suggesting the bitter attacks undermine John McCain and Barack Obama’s credibility with voters and could backfire.

“Both campaigns are making a mistake, and that is they are taking whatever their attacks are and going one step too far,” said former White House political adviser Karl Rove. “They don’t need to attack each other in this way.”

“There ought to be an adult who says, ‘Do we really need to go that far in this ad? Don’t we make our point and won’t we get broader acceptance and deny the opposition an opportunity to attack us if we don’t include that one little last tweak in the ad?'”

In the last week, the McCain campaign has put out an Internet ad accusing Obama of calling Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin a pig when he used the phrase putting “lipstick on a pig” to criticize the GOP ticket as trying to make a bad situation look better. McCain supporters said Obama was slyly alluding to Palin’s description of herself as a pit bull in lipstick, but there was nothing in his remarks to support the claim.

The McCain campaign also produced an ad saying Obama favored “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners; as an Illinois state senator, Obama voted for legislation that would teach age-appropriate sex education to kindergartners, including information on rejecting advances by sexual predators.

In turn, a recent Obama TV ad makes a none-too-subtle dig at McCain’s age in saying McCain hasn’t changed in the last 26 years. It shows McCain at a hearing in the early 1980s, wearing giant glasses and an out-of-style suit. “He admits he still doesn’t know how to use a computer, can’t send an e-mail, still doesn’t understand the economy, and favors $200 billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class,” the commercial says.

Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who unsuccessfully sought the GOP presidential nomination, said McCain and Obama need to engage more openly in town hall meetings rather than back-and-forth negative advertising.

“I agree that the campaign has gotten too negative on both sides,” Giuliani said. “If the two of them are out there answering questions, a lot of these ads are going to get done that way, they’re going to be able to confront each other with these things. Senator Obama can explain his views on sex education and just what he was doing with that. Senator McCain can either back off it or agree with it.”

Rove said he believed that Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment was a “deliberate slap at Governor Palin,” saying it came too soon after the Alaska governor’s pitbull comment not to be. Rove also said while it might be fair to criticize McCain for being a longtime Washington insider, faulting McCain for not using a computer when he can’t type due to war injuries is not.

“McCain has gone in some of his ads — similarly gone one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test,” Rove said, without elaborating.

Golly, no wonder people are so turned off to politics, eh? Thank goodness we have decent, God fearing, non-partisan elders like Rove and Giuliani to step in and guide them back to the the issues people really care about before things get out of hand. John McCain is such an honorable man that even the hate-filled Democrats are forced to repeatedly admit it. He’ll be the first to say that this has gone too far, I’m sure. But there’s no guarantee that vicious liberal attack dogs will pull themselves back from the brink.

And then McCain will, understandably, have to defend himself.

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The Right Genuflection

by digby

Eleanor Clift writes about McCain and the evangelicals in this week’s Newsweek. She claims that it isn’t just the Palin pick that has energized the Christian Right, as much as that pleases them. (They like to be catered to.)There were a couple of other signals they heard loudly and clearly:

When word leaked the Friday morning before the Republican National Convention that Sarah Palin was John McCain’s choice for vice president, a group of 40 religious leaders meeting in Washington all gave a standing ovation. They were convinced that McCain would settle on one of his buddies, Tom Ridge or Joe Lieberman, men whose pro-choice views render them unworthy contenders from the Christian-right perspective. They didn’t know much about Palin, but the fact she wasn’t Ridge or Lieberman was enough to make them cheer

They were so surprised by McCain’s bold nod in their direction that their whole view of him changed. They were willing to re-evaluate him in the light of this astonishing appointment (though some in the room warned against getting carried away). “He’ll disappoint you,” they said, mindful of McCain’s inconsistency when it comes to pledging fealty to the religious right

The account of this gathering comes from Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and senior adviser to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. He has been much in demand since the Palin pick, explaining to inquiring journalists the attributes of evangelicals and Pentecostals and where they differ from fundamentalists. He has a ready quip that he attributes to a Duke University professor: Evangelicals really, really like Billy Graham.

Fundamentalists think Billy Graham is a liberal. When news of Bristol Palin’s pregnancy broke during the GOP convention, Cromartie fielded calls from journalists wondering about the impact on the McCain campaign and on Palin’s status as an icon of traditional values. Cromartie assured them that McCain had ascended yet another rung in the eyes of conservative, religiously oriented voters because he didn’t make the 17-year-old’s pregnancy disqualifying. He noted that many of the mega-churches associated with the evangelical movement have crisis-pregnancy centers. McCain is on a streak with evangelicals, which explains much of his sudden rise in the polls. “He’s had a trifecta,” says Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. First was the Saddleback forum and McCain’s interview with mega-church pastor Rick Warren, where McCain put to rest doubts that he could talk about his faith. Second was the Republican platform, where language aimed at finding common-ground solutions to reduce the number of abortions was struck from the final draft. The omission received scant notice from the media but hugely boosted McCain’s stock among pro-life activists. The offending language: “We invite all persons of good will, whether across the political aisle or within our party, to work together to reduce the incidence of abortion.”

What could be more offensive than that?

The problem isn’t that McCain is suddenly becoming a member of the religious right. I’m sure he isn’t. The guy is one of the most “secular” types I’ve seen in a long time at this level of national politics. The problem is that he doesn’t really give a damn about any of it. I have no doubt that he’ll happily turn the social agenda over to … Sarah Palin, the religious right’s new poster girl.

They clearly aren’t going to put her in charge of foreign policy or economics. What else is she going to do?

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The Tiberius Gambit

by digby

I received an interesting comment today from a reader:

A lot of ink was spilled just a few weeks ago about the deep divides in the Democratic Party (strategic where they weren’t fabrications and less noticeable, methinks, post-Palin, despite the GOP’s “Hillary Voter” bullshit.) and yet there is almost no notice taken of the very real internal war going on within the Republican Party.

I do not believe there has ever been a more direct repudiation of an incumbent two-term president by the nominee of his own party than the one John McCain administered to George Bush in his convention speech. Ironically, despite a few pro forma attempts to lay the blame on “both parties,” McCain was at his most specific in an otherwise vague and rambling speech when he cataloged the many ills that Republican rule has inflicted on the nation. How can this unprecedented attempt to focus the blame on his predecessor pass with so little reflection? Why is there no reporting, or even speculation, about George Bush’s private response to this brutal public sleight?

I believe the reasons are primarily three-fold. One, since the media must have instantly known that McCain’s claim to be an agent of change, given his lockstep, pro-Bush voting record and the structure of his campaign staff, was so flimsy you couldn’t wipe your ass with it, they’ve just ignored any political or policy split with Bush since they know it doesn’t really exist. Two, the Palin distraction has so far been such an all-purpose black hole, sucking down any vestige of substance from her election, that no one has time for Bush anymore – he’s so Old GOP. Three, for once George Bush has decided to get even, rather than get mad.

Which brings me to my central point. McCain may still be grateful for the fact that the Bush- flunky Rove disciples he has running his campaign have rescued it from oblivion and brought him within striking distance of the prize he’s sold his soul for, but I doubt he’ll feel the same way after the election. Because win or lose, make no mistake about it, brand McCain has been destroyed. And therein we see the long arm of George Bush and the hand of Karl Rove. It may well be that a scorched earth campaign was his only shot, but consider how every attack and every lie, while they serve to smear Obama, also serve to undermine he credibility, honor and self-image of John McCain. I can hear George cackling as Karl explained how cool it would be: We might just pull out a win for the folks who own the country, but at the same time we totally fuck over McCain by getting him to destroy the only thing he really had going for him.

And how does the notoriously short-tempered McCain really feel about the fact that he had to crawl to the religious extremists now vying with the neo-cons for control of the party and employ the very Bushies who smeared him eight years ago and are now using him as a tool to do the same to Obama? I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to assume that these two petulant narcissists absolutely hate and despise each other. And who is writing about the devastating effects these personal and political wars may have on our future? From where I’m sitting, it looks like Bush has gotten the best of it – and as a bonus he gets to say F.U. to the country as well by using his slime machine to ensure his dreadful policies will be continued.

It can be useful to look at what happened to he succession of power once ancient Rome made the transition from republic to empire under Julius Caesar. I think of it as the Tiberius Gambit. Each emperor did his best to ensure that the one who followed him could never rival his achievements. And it was a short step indeed for Tiberius to inflict he egregious Caligula on the empire, secure in the knowledge that he would make the populace yearn for the comparatively golden days of his own rule. So Augustus gave us Tiberius, Tiberius gave us Caligula and the accidental Claudius gave us Nero. Nero almost destroyed the Roman economy by his personal greed and burned part of Rome intending, perhaps, to remove the blight of a quarter congested with the urban poor. When it got way out of hand and he began to feel universal public opprobrium, he blamed it on a fringe group of alien terrorists, the early Christians.

So Bush would give us McCain and McCain would give us Palin and Palin will ignite the fire and fiddle while the planet burns. The joke is on us. Hail!

sleon
Cambridge, MA

I have always felt that Karl and Junior’s primary consideration in anything at this point is rehabilitating the Bush legacy. It is what all failed presidents do and this one is very very failed. Being conservatives (and Bush being essentially lazy) rather than starting a Habitat For Humanity or embracing a useful cause, this would be the likely way they would do it.

I don’t think Rove had ever thought McCain could win this. (Not very many people did…) Sure, they’d give it the old college try, but I suspect their plan all along was to lay the groundwork for a Bush reputation comeback.

Oddly, it’s the left’s revulsion for Palin that is already ushering in this new era of Bush appreciation. Here’s Steve Clemons, in a post which asks if Sarah Palin reads books:

No matter where one may sit on the political spectrum and whether one believes or not that George W. Bush served his nation and our system of checks and balances and civil society well, the notion that he is entirely anti-intellectual and that his only pals were baseball franchise owners and oil men is contrived mystique. Underneath the fake rough veneer made flamboyantly rougher with his less frequent brush clearing sojourns in the hot August heat in Crawford, Texas — George W. Bush is an incredibly well read national leader. To be clear, I don’t think Bush’s deeds have made the nation safer or more prosperous — but I go into great detail here to establish a benchmark for knowledge about America’s and mankind’s great challenges, a point of comparison for anyone who aspires to the highest office in the land. Bush ranks low on many contemporary rankings comparing the success of presidencies. He has been called anti-intellectual and incurious by many. I don’t buy it — but he serves well as a model that conservatives would be willing to consider as a standard for the presidency.

I’m sorry. I just don’t believe that Bush actually read any of those books. Rove created a myth around his being a “great wartime leader” and put some books in his hands and gave him some talking points. He is not an intellectual, it shows in everything he does, the way he speaks, the decisions he makes, the people he trusts.

He is a failed president partially because he never had any control over his own government due to his natural ineptitude and lack of intelligence, whether “book learnin'” or native. And we knew this going in. He had six years experience as a figure head of a state that is run by the Lieutenant Governor Prior to that he’d been a front man for the New York Texas Rangers and a failed business man at everything else. The only difference between Bush and Palin is that Bush comes from a powerful family, went to ivy league schools as a rich legacy student and traded on his famous father’s name his whole life, which makes him marginally more believable as president because of the example of idiot heirs in royal dynasties. They are both anti-intellectual dolts.

These Republicans are installing successively more absurd people in the presidency and Sleon’s reasoning makes as much sense as anything I’ve heard. If these people actually are the best this country can come up with we’ve gone far beyond ancient Rome and are in the realm of Alice in Wonderland.

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McCain To Media: It’s My Party And I’ll Lie If I Want To

by tristero

[Thanks for all your kind words about The Origin. I’ll post more soon but now it’s back to your regularly scheduled bizarro-world reports. ]

In case you missed this, a conservative actually spoke the truth:

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said this to the Politico about the increased media scrutiny of the campaign’s factual claims: “We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

Only a pedant would interpret that as saying something other than, “We’re gonna lie our heads off if we think it’ll help us win ’cause that’s all that matters. And you can’t stop us.”

And how baldly is McCain lying? He’s lying so egregiously that, as dday noted, even Karl Rove thinks McCain’s gone too far.

If we had a working political press corps, instead of the mediocrities, liars, suck-ups, and fools we actually do have, then they would feel no compulsion to repeat McCain’s lies, except to debunk them, as in:

“There they go again. Adding to their already long list of lies, patently untrue assertions, and gross distortions, the McCain campaign said today…”

But if it makes you feel better, Obama raised $66 million, McCain only $47 million! Wowee Zowee! That really sounds like something until you realize that having an entire tv station flacking the latest McCain/Bush/Palin iies is easily worth an extra double $19 million.

But let’s give Obama credit. He has run a campaign so basically honorable and decent he has done his mother proud. And that is truly moving, even inspiring. Unfortunately, every other Democrat has decided to do likewise or go missing (where is Clinton? She should have been all over the Sunday bloviations).

That’s not to say Democrats should start lying like McCain and Bush/Palin. There are plenty of ways to fight. Need an idea? Digby has a great one: confront the disaster that is conservatism head on, no punches pulled.

WWTD

by digby

I don’t use the old saw “imagine if this were a Democrat” anymore because it’s implicit in just about everything the Republicans do these days. But this is really too much. We heard constant hand wringing from the press during the primaries about the horrors of having Bill Clinton anywhere near the White house should the harpy Clinton win the election. Or Obama, with Clinton as his VP, for that matter. People have been rending their garments for months over the possibility that a successful ex-president might be hanging around the white house giving advice. (Of course, when Bush ran, the implicit — if unfulfilled — promise that Poppy would be around gave the same people confidence that the callow, unqualified Junior would have sage guidance.) Even Rudy Giuliani was soundly spanked for suggesting that his wife might sit in on cabinet meetings.

But here we have the underqualified Governor of Alaska empowering her even more undqualified husband, whose main claim to fame in life is being a snow machine racer, to be an intrinsic part of her executive team:

In voting to issue a subpoena to Todd Palin in an investigation of the firing of the Alaska public safety commissioner, state lawmakers on Friday signaled that Mr. Palin, the husband of Gov. Sarah Palin, might have played a central role in one of the most contentious episodes of her governorship.

While that suggestion goes beyond the image presented of Mr. Palin during the Republican convention as a blue-collar family man and sportsman, it echoes a widely held understanding among lawmakers, state employees and lobbyists about Mr. Palin’s heavy engagement in state government.

In the small circle of advisers close to the governor, these people say, Mr. Palin is among the closest, and he plays an unpaid but central role in many aspects of the administration of Ms. Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president.

Mr. Palin’s involvement in the governor’s office has prompted an irreverent quip by some capital staff members when decisions are to be made that might affect the governor: “What would Todd do?”

It goes on to outline many instances of Palin’s involvement or attendance at meetings, usually sitting quietly in a corner saying little … like Dick Cheney.

If Todd Palin played a large role in Palin’s administration people have a right to hear from him about it. Hillary’s professional life was a major concern in the 1992 election and Michelle Obama’s speeches have been parsed almost as closely as her husband’s. It would be one thing if he was uninvolved in his wife’s business, like Howard Dean’s wife was. But any spouse who is involved in his or her spouse’s administration simply has to submit himself to questioning.

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The War On Facts

by dday

Karl Rove today:

This week, non-partisan fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org
have called Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) out for lies in his attack ads against Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL). But on Fox News Sunday today, former Bush political adviser Karl Rove dismissed the organizations, claiming that “they’ve got their own biases built in there.” “You can’t trust the fact-check organizations,” said Rove.

You know, FactCheck.org does have some problems on occasion (Politifact, on the other hand, is great). But that’s not really the point. Rove’s job, and by extension McCain’s job, is to basically nuke reality and leave everything open to question. In a world where there is an objective reality, Republicans can’t function and certainly can’t run their electoral strategy. They need two things – ignorance and an unknowable truth. That’s been true since well before the Mayberry Machiavellis arrived in Washington and will be true long after they leave.

And so Sarah Palin’s ignorance of the Bush Doctrine is OK, because most Americans don’t know what it means either. In fact, the less knowledge a world leader has, the better, because they can’t be muddled up with all those facts about how occupied countries historically resist occupation or how countries become interdependent or which country wields power over their sphere of influence, or such related nonsense. Candidates who have little interest in foreign affairs are “authentic” and the kind of reg’lar folks we need to rule with their gut-level belief. The fact that Sarah Palin, for example, is a real person in an unreal situation is a net good. Putting her a heartbeat away from the Presidency is of no consequence.

I have to agree with this assessment from Bradrocket:

The GOP has become one giant St00p1d Machine. They revel in being ignorant about everything, and anyone who actually has knowledge about a given topic is treated at best as suspect. The fact that Sarah Palin has, at least for the moment, been a boon to McCain’s campaign is the dark reflection of a nation that has lost its ability to think. American popular culture has done to us in 50 years what centuries of drinking lead-poisoned water did to the Romans. If you ever wanted evidence that the United States is in its official decline period, Sarah Palin is it.

With a caveat: there is a difference between a country’s citizens being stupid and being ignorant. IMO the United States is the latter, and actually it’s worse than that. One party has recognized that you can easily confuse the public by throwing mud at facts and reality and making the truth suspect. That has the practical effect of making people stupid, but in actuality they are ignorant because of this parallel reality that the cynical GOP leadership has created.

And I think the Obama campaign is right to call this dishonorable. McCain and his minions know exactly what they’re doing. They don’t believe their own bullshit. They know that their victory strategy is closely tied to denying reality.

The reviews are in on McCain’s strategy of distorting, distracting and outright lying to the American people and what that says about his character, but the St. Petersburg Times put it best when they said his “campaign of lies disgraces McCain” and “McCain’s straight talk has become a toxic mix of lies and double-speak. It is leaving a permanent stain on his reputation for integrity.”

I think turning this into a character attack is the only way to stop it.

…I should note that even Rove said that McCain went a bit too far in some of his ads this week about Obama. That’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel when Rove is critiquing your fact pattern.

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The Origin: An Opera-Oratorio Inspired By Charles Darwin

Photo courtesy of Scott Hurst – www.hurstphoto.biz

by tristero

Note: This is not a post about politics. I’ve received many inquiries about my music and, while I’ve been hesitant to talk about it here, I thought some readers might be interested in what I’ve been up to.

After a year and a half of near-daily composing, I have finally finished The Origin, an opera-oratorio inspired by the life and works of Charles Darwin. It was a challenging, and very enjoyable, project and will premiere February 9, 2009 at the State University of New York, Oswego – that’s 3 days before Darwin’s 200th birthday!

The music is scored for Soprano, Baritone, chorus, orchestra, and the wonderful Eastern European female choir, Kitka. In addition, the brilliant filmmaker Bill Morrison – known for his work with Ridge Theater, Michael Gordon, and others – will be creating films and other visuals for the performance.

I’d like to give you a brief introduction to the piece and share some short clips of the music in rough demo form. If you are interested, I’ll describe and post more of the music in subsequent posts,.

The texts used in the Origin are taken entirely from the writings of Charles Darwin – with a brief cameo by his wife, Emma. They were compiled and arranged by poet Catherine Barnett and myself. Most of the words come from The Origin of Species; the so-called “transmutation notebooks;” Darwin’s autobiography; The Voyage of the Beagle; and his letters (you can find a huge selection of Darwin’s writings at this incredible site). My purpose was to celebrate Darwin’s thought and life in music, concentrating specifically on the writing and ideas in The Origin of Species.

I had wanted to do a piece with a scientific subject for a very long time. Many years ago, someone in the New Yorker– very likely Richard Dawkins – noted that while religion had its masterpieces like Bach’s St Matthew Passion, science had no comparable works. That struck me as an amusing, and exciting, challenge. I knew I could never write anything remotely approaching the St. Matthew, but the notion of setting to music a classic scientific text really stuck in my mind. The question was: which one? Galileo’s Starry Messenger? Newton’s Principia (which I had already used in a dance piece)? Einstein’s first paper on relativity?

A few years later, I had a big argument with a close and very smart friend, who argued that “intelligent design” creationism should be taught alongside evolution in science classes. I was so shocked that my friend had been bamboozled that it reawakened my interest in evolution and Darwin. I started to follow closely the social “controversy” – as you know, there is no controversy about the reality of evolution – and have posted many times about the issue.

I can’t remember a time I was not aware of Darwin’s theory – my father, a doctor, had probably explained evolution by natural selection to me by the time I was seven or eight. Then, in high school, I read John T. Scopes’ autobiography, Center of the Storm, and saw Inherit the Wind. I was amazed then, and remain just as amazed now, to learn that anyone could reject or be repelled by this incredibly beautiful, and so obviously correct, theory of life’s diversity. Since then, I’ve remained interested in the science of evolution, reading both pop science books like The Beak of the Finch and, very occasionally, an actual scientific text, such as Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution.

After my friend and I argued – to be frank, I was openly rude and contemptuous, and it damaged the friendship for a while – I started reading about evolution in earnest and decided that somehow I would address the subject in music. I toyed with the idea of addressing creationism directly, but the thought of having to set all those lies and stupidity to music really did not interest me in the slightest. Then I saw the Darwin show at the American Museum of Natural History – it’s now traveling to different cities – and I saw the notebooks Darwin kept. I knew immediately I had to do a piece about the making of the Origin of Species. I had my science subject.

I contacted my friend, conductor Julie Pretzat at SUNY Oswego, who had expressed interest in commissioning a large new piece, and told her my idea (Julie had conducted a fine performance of Voices of Light a few years before). She loved it and contacted Mary Avrakotos, who runs ARTSwego, which presents many exciting arts events for the upstate New York community. She was equally excited and so they applied for, and got, a special New York State Music Fund grant for large interdisciplinary music projects (thank you, Eliott Spitzer!). I asked another friend, philosopher and bete noire of creationists, Barbara Forrest, to be one of my advisers on Darwin. I read everything I could get my hands on. Then, I started to compose. And compose. And compose.

The finished piece is evening-length, 105 minutes long. Before it gets started in earnest, there is a wordless introduction called “Representation of Chaos.” This is one of many “in” jokes and hidden references in the piece. Almost anyone who has sung in a large choir has performed Haydn’s wonderful oratorio “The Creation” which opens with a wordless introduction called …”Representation of Chaos.” Haydn’s “Representation” ends as a singer intones, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And God said, let there be light, and there was LIGHT.” At which point, the orchestra explodes with an overwhelming C major blast, eradicating the chaos and creating order.

I roughly imitate this idea, although my music is completely different from, and, of course, not comparable to Haydn’s masterpiece. Here’s a brief excerpt from the middle of my Representation of Chaos as “performed” by sampled orchestra with a montage of Scott Hurst’s beautiful Galapagos photography (I’ll talk about the technology I use to compose in a future post, perhaps):

That’s about 1/4 of the entire movement. After Representation of Chaos ends, the piece proper begins. Three different kinds of music alternate, which represent three different parts of Darwin’s life.

Kitka, the Eastern European music ensemble, sings Darwin’s autobiographical writings; they are his public persona, his worldly voice. I used this group because it is such a haunting, unusual sound – and I wanted Darwin’s life to have a unique voice. If you are familiar with Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, then you know how beautiful that sound is. The two vocal soloists sing mostly excerpts from Darwin’s notebooks and letters, what I call the Sandwalk music, after the pathway at Darwin’s house which he frequently walked. They represent his efforts to construct a valid theory of evolution. Finally, the chorus mostly sings excerpts from The Origin of Species, ie, the theory fully realized and described.

Here are some excerpts from “Annie’s Memorial,” which is sung, in a live preview performance, by Kitka. Darwin had ten children. His most beloved daughter, Annie, died at the age of ten from a mysterious ailment. Her death is often taken as a turning point in the development of Darwin’s scientific worldview of a universe ruled by impersonal forces, not a benign Creator. A week after she died, Darwin wrote a touching memorial to her and I set several parts of it. You’ll hear part of the opening as well as the second to last section. The montage shows Darwin, his wife Emma, Annie, their home, Darwin’s writing, and the contents of Annie’s memorial box:

My dear Emma
My dear, dearest Emma
I pray God Fanny’s note may have prepared you
She went to her final rest
most tranquilly, most sweetly.

Our poor child Annie was born on Gower Street
On March Second, Eighteen Forty One.
Our poor child Annie expir’d at Malvern
At midday on the Twenty Third of April Eighteen Fifty One…

Once when she was very young she exclaimed ,
”Oh Mama what should we do if you were to die?”
…

I don’t want to make this post too long, so I’ll stop here. If you’re interested, I can post some more music and explain both the techniques and processes behind this score. It was a tremendous pleasure to work with Darwin’s words and ideas. I hope sometime you have a chance to see the entire piece performed, with Bill Morrison’s films.